Is it proportionate to bomb the town of Kochav Ya’ir, where top commanders and political officials live, when its residents are asleep or eating dinner with their families? That’s a horrid question that has no right to be asked. But Israel long ago gave an affirmative answer to the general question: Is it proportionate to crush neighborhoods and bomb homes with entire families in them – children, elderly people, women and babies?

Panel at J Street on saving Israel from occupation. Tony Klug is second from left. Jessica Montell is at right. Photo from Ben Murane's twitter feed

if Israel does not end the occupation sharply, and if organized Jewish opinion in other countries appears openly to back it, there will indeed almost certainly be a further surge in anti-Jewish sentiment, potentially unleashing more sinister impulses.

Labour Friends of Israel adorns itself in the slogan “For Israel, For Palestine, For Peace” while opponents of BDS on campus proclaim an interest in building “bridges” not “walls”. This is hardly Netanyahu’s language; he is the man who hurries voters to the polls with nakedly racist warnings that Arabs are voting too while his ministers openly call for genocide against Palestinian mothers who give birth to “little snakes”.

A Palestinian and an Israeli settler walk on opposite sides of a concrete barrier in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, February 2012.

Ryan Rodrick Beiler ActiveStills

when was the last time anyone heard a complaint from any of the major Orthodox rabbis in Israel — or anywhere else, for that matter — about the Israeli government’s systematic theft of other people’s property?

NOT ALL JEWS SUPPORT ISRAELSunday, 08 December 2019 December, 2019 To the British public. The fact which is often ignored in the debate about anti-Semitism in the UK is that many Jews in the UK and throughout Europe oppose the policies of Israel, and strongly reject the claims of that state to... Read More...

Anti-Zionism Isn’t the Same as Anti-SemitismSunday, 09 December 2018 The New York Times, Dec. 7, 2018 The centrality of Israel to American Jewish identity has at times put liberal American Jews in an awkward position, defending multiethnic pluralism here, where they’re in the minority, while treating it as... Read More...